The Monolith Monsters (1957)

Directed by John Sherwood; produced by Howard Christie

A meteorite crashes into the deserts of southern California, shattering into hundreds of pieces. What are seen by a geologist (Phil Harvey) and a little girl (Linda Scheley) as curiosities begin to grow when in contact with water, and soon, life and property are menaced by toppling towers of stone. It’s up to another scientist (Grant Williams) and his fellow townspeople to stop what seems to be unstoppable.

The late 1940s and the ‘50s were the golden age of science fiction cinema, when the genre made the leap from books to film. Like its printed counterpart, the science fiction movie was often cheap, poorly made and, literally, ridiculous. Bad science fiction tends to overshadow much that was good; indeed, the latter is often lumped with the former simply because it might be low-budget and from the 1950s. But The Monolith Monsters is an example of quality overcoming limitations.

The Monolith Monsters certainly isn’t very good – it doesn’t approach The Thing from Another World (reviewed on this blog in 2017) – but it is good, nonetheless. The premise is original: there is no alien race intent on conquest, no sentient life with which to reason, no advanced technology. There is instead a very puzzling scientific problem: how to stop something that, when it combines with a plentiful and, indeed, indispensible element of human existence, becomes relentless. The solution is, in fact, arbitrary, in which case the problem then cleverly switches to its application. The science, as in most such films, would be dubious in the real world, but within the context of the story remains legitimate.

The script is intelligence enough not to be insulting to the viewer. The characters use their brains sufficiently and their egos not much at all. The Monolith Monsters is gratifyingly free of the stupid characters that populate too many movies and who are included, apparently, just to add contrived crises. There are a few holes in the script, though they are more like ‘slips’: for instance, touching the extraterrestrial rock evidently results in an organism’s petrifaction, even though several characters touch the objects without harm. Judging by events, I assumed that touching the wet rock led to the fatal result, though this point is not made in the film.

While The Monolith Monsters uses a number of genre clichés, such as the isolated community in danger, it mitigates some. For example, though the town in question (population 1,500) is set apart, its residents are quick to utilise the greater resources found farther away.

Another amateur reviewer mentioned that the townspeople in the film are too compliant; I presume he referred to the lack of resistance to evacuating the community, and to the coöperation among the characters. The latter aspect caused me no disturbance. Sometimes people do work well together. As for residents willingly fleeing their town in the face of disaster, one must recall that this movie was made in 1957: moving quickly and without question when told was practiced in the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

The acting is competent. Williams is best known for being the title character in The Incredible Shrinking Man, also released in 1957, and another science fiction film with no villain. He does well as someone who could be the handsome leading man but nonetheless must be the ordinary person caught in extraordinary circumstances. The female lead (Lola Albright) is unremarkable, but the other supporting players are natural and effective. William Schallert appears uncredited as a weatherman who doesn’t do well in emergencies, and Troy Donahue, a couple of years away from his time as a heart-throb, has a bit part as a demolitions-man.

Something I didn’t expect was the quality of the direction. There is a strong element of tension, especially in the first twenty minutes or so, and this is helped by use of foreshadowing, such as the sight of a dam or the sound of thunder. When the audience knows the secret for which the protagonists are searching, and the director uses this knowledge well, suspense can be created. It helps when the protagonists aren’t missing the clues through mental density.

Though The Monolith Monsters is not even among the best science fiction films of its decade, it is nonetheless an entertaining movie which does what every successful picture does: it uses what it has to the greatest advantage.